It’s a game writer who dares describe a Texas dawn. It’s too easy to sound like greeting card verse and especially cheeky when it’s the opening shot in a career-spanning essay collection.

But in the first of 32 choice essays for The Eye of the Mammoth, Stephen Harrigan brings heat. His “Morning Light” is so heartwarming, so sparkling and deep you can feel the sun’s rays spread like liquid gold across the state.

In what their author calls “a panoramic look backward” over 32 years of writing for magazines from The Atlantic to Texas Monthly (his home base), these witty, wise short pieces are memorable letters to us all.

The anthology takes its title from Harrigan’s haunting essay about his visits to mammoth sites in Texas, ending at the Roberts County Museum, where a mural reminds him of a photograph he saw of a mammoth’s eye in a millennia-old cave painting in France.

“There is nothing prehistoric about it,” he recalls. “It feels timeless and immediate, as if this long-extinct mammoth is looking at you, assessing you as you stand there in your pocket of time, holding you in an unbreakable gaze as deep and ageless as a trance.”

For a writer who admits to homesickness on the road, Harrigan really scoots around. He travels to Innsbruck to view a mummified Stone Age man found in a glacier, to Mexico City to see excavated remains of the Great Temple and to Czech villages in search of kin and ancestral kolaches. Along the way he tells us precisely what he sees and thinks and feels.

Conversant in history, nature and life, Harrigan beckons us into the vast Chihuahuan Desert, up the Alaska Highway beneath a never-setting sun and into the pristine, gleaming igloo built especially for him by an Inuit elder with only two tools: a crosscut saw and snow knife.

We follow Harrigan to Padre Island, Big Bend, Monte Carlo, the set of Lonesome Dove and the Yucatán as the veteran diver and his gutsy family snorkel their way across the peninsula’s watery sinkholes called cenotes.

Part Irish, Scotch-Irish and “murky Middle European,” Harrigan may have what he calls “the generic round face, bald head and mushy features of an Eastern Bloc apparatchik,” but he writes like a Gaelic bard with singing humanity, heartbreak and guffaws.

Aspiring screenwriters will study his funny, instructive essay “Fade In, Fade Out,” about his 30-year career as the A-list author of some 40 movies on assignment, 13 or 14 of which, including CBS’ popular Beyond the Prairie: The True Story of Laura Ingalls Wilder and FoxTV’s much-watched The O.J. Simpson Story, were produced.

For years I’ve been nodding at Harrigan across crowded rooms at readings, the Texas Book Festival (of which he’s a founding member) and the Southwestern Writers Collection (home of his archive) but now, thanks to his warm, personal style, I know something about him — that he once built an eyesore of a playhouse for his girls, that he has “the provincial Texan’s deep-seated suspicion of serious culture” and once entered the Westfest kolache-baking contest.

Publication dates of the essays would have put them in context for fans. And why not include simple maps of his travels like the one in Harrigan’s classic “Water and Light, a Diver’s Journey to a Coral Reef” or a picture of Jacques-Louis David’s painting The Anger of Achilles that so impressed the author at the Kimbell Art Museum?

My favorite Harrigan piece, missing here, was written for UT Press’ handsome Texas State Cemetery book, in which he points out in his droll, elegant way that the state’s “warriors, deal makers, legislators and railroad commissioners” far outrank and outnumber its writers, artists and musicians buried in that hallowed ground.

Back when my beat was Texas film and TV production for The Dallas Morning News, I called Harrigan, who lives in Austin, for his opinion of the set for Disney’s The Alamo, built on a ranch in Bee Cave.

He said the whole time he was writing his best-selling novel The Gates of the Alamo, he tried to conjure what San Antonio de Bexar looked like in 1836. Then he walked on the set and there it was down to crops grown in that era. “It was bewitching,” he said.

That’s a proper adjective for these charming, transporting essays. They are enchanting, irresistible and cast a magic spell.